By Rebecca Gambler

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has seen a significant increase in the number of individuals they apprehend between U.S. ports of entry along the southwest border. This has resulted in overcrowding and difficult humanitarian conditions in its facilities.

CBP monitors the care of individuals in its custody in various ways. For example, staff are required to conduct and document welfare checks every 15 minutes for individuals who are sick or injured. However, Border Patrol (a part of CBP) does not have a mechanism to verify that staff have done so across field locations.

We recommended that Border Patrol implement such a mechanism.

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2022. 50p.

By Bob Libal with contributions from Setareh Ghandehari and Silky Shah

  Every day, thousands of people are cruelly deprived of their liberty in a vast system of mass immigration detention in the United States. For years, detained people and advocates have organized to close troubled immigration detention centers and exposed the horrors of a detention system rife with extreme negligence, abuse, and even death. Numerous studies document that detention is also wholly unnecessary.1 Despite overwhelming evidence that immigrants successfully navigate their immigration cases in community, the immigration detention system — now with over 230 facilities in the United States — has seen exponential growth across the last three presidential administrations. In just the last four years, the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) grew dramatically to an average daily population of more than 50,000 people in Fiscal Year (FY) 2019, by far the most in the agency’s history. This unprecendented expansion of detention was propelled not by changing migration trends, but by a resurgence of nativist and xenophobic rhetoric translated into harsher policies towards both arriving immigrants and long-term non-citizen residents. Detention expansion continued under the Trump administration despite draconian enforcement policies such as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), the expansion of the border wall, and Title 42, meant to keep people from    arriving at the border or seeking asylum once they did. Due to a variety of factors, including detention numbers trending down, an ongoing global pandemic, and a shifting political landscape, the Biden administration has an opportunity to begin the process of phasing out immigration detention entirely. This report addresses one stated barrier to detention center  closures — the economic impacts of detention centers on host communities

Washington, DC: Detention Watch Network 2021. 29p.

By Neil Donnelly

To examine changes in the clear up rate for New South Wales (NSW) crimes by considering offence-specific trends in the NSW Police Force 90-day legal action rate over the 15 years from 2009 to 2023. METHOD Data were extracted from the NSW Police Force’s Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS) for incidents reported between 2009 and 2023. This includes the total number of incidents reported, the number of persons of interest legally proceeded against, and the percentage of incidents where police commenced legal action against at least one person within 90 days of reporting. Trends were examined separately across 11 major offence categories using the percentage point change and the total percentage change. The Kendall’s rank order correlation test to determine statistical significance. RESULTS Over the 15 years from 2009 to 2023, there were significant increases in the 90-day legal action rate for nine of the 11 offences examined. The largest percentage point changes were observed for robbery (up 19.9 percentage points (p.p.)), malicious damage to property (up 14.2 p.p.), break and enter non-dwelling (up 12.7 p.p.), break and enter dwelling (up 8.5 p.p.), motor vehicle theft (up 7.9 p.p.) and domestic violence (DV) related assault (up 6.5 p.p.). Smaller, though significant, increases were also found for steal from motor vehicle (up 3.0 p.p.), non-DV related assault (up 2.5 p.p.) and sexual touching, sexual act and other sexual offences (up 2.0 p.p.). By contrast there was a significant decline in the 90-day legal action rate for reported incidents of sexual assault over the 15-year period examined (down -3.4 p.p.). For most property offences, the upward trend in legal action rates has not caused a significant growth in criminal court workload. This is because the fall in crime rates over the last 15 years has been even greater than the rise in legal actions. This is not true for DV assault and sexual touching, sexual acts and other sexual offences. The combination of a rise in incident counts and the improvements in legal action rates has resulted in more people being brought before the criminal courts for these offences. The overall number of sexual assault incidents recorded by police over the 15-year period also increased. This increase offset the decline in the legal action rate in recent years, leading to a higher number of offenders being proceeded against to court for this offence.

Parramatta, NSW: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR), 2025. 11p.

By Irshad Altheimer, Hayder Alhafedhi, Rashid Muhammad

his report provides a descriptive analysis of Rochester Police Department (RPD) traffic stop data. We analyzed 41,201 traffic stops performed by RPD between 2015 and 2023. The stop data consisted of 83 variables, but the analysis of many of those variables was hampered by high numbers of missing values. Increased scrutiny of law enforcement practices has led to calls for the collection and analysis of police stop data. Such data analysis is essential for fostering accountability and transparency within the police departments. Police officers in the United States conduct at least 50,000 traffic stops every day, making these stops a central part of modern policing and the most common way in which the public interacts with law enforcement (Policing Project, 2019). Beyond the frequency, traffic stops often lead to significant financial hardship for individuals through fines and fees, and evidence suggests that both traffic and pedestrian stops disproportionately impact people of color (Policing Project, 2019). Despite how common these stops are, there is still much we do not understand about traffic stop practices and the full effects of traffic stops. Analyzing this data enables the identification of patterns and trends within policing practices, including disparities in traffic stops based on factors such as race, gender, or geographic location (Policing Project, 2019). This helps to assess the effectiveness of current policing strategies and ultimately develop informed policy reforms aimed at promoting equitable policing practices. Transparency is crucial in law enforcement because it builds trust between police departments and the communities they serve. When the actions, decisions, and data of law enforcement agencies are open to public scrutiny, it demonstrates a commitment to accountability and ethical practices. This openness allows citizens to understand the reasoning behind police actions, reducing misunderstandings and promoting cooperation. Strong relationships based on mutual trust between police and the communities they serve are vital for effective policing and public safety; community members are more likely to cooperate with law enforcement and provide crucial information when they trust that police actions are fair and reflect community values (Community Relations Service, n.d.). Transparency is a key element in fostering this trust, as timely and open communication about critical incidents helps reassure the public that information is not being deliberately withheld (Community Relations Service, n.d.). This report is divided into the following sections. First, we provide an overview of the data. Second, we provide a descriptive analysis of the data that could be reliably analyzed. Third, we provide recommendations for future data collection.

Working Paper 2025-01 - 01

Rochester, NY: Center for Public Safety Initiatives Rochester Institute of Technology, 2025. 15p.

By Iain Britton

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a proud tradition of volunteers in law enforcement stretching back to colonial times (Greenberg, 2015). Until very recently many police departments, large and small, had volunteer auxiliary police. Many of which had existed essentially in their current forms since the 1940s and 1950s (Spigel, 2017). This reflects the abundant picture of tens of thousands of volunteer auxiliary and reserve police in hundreds of law enforcement agencies across most states in the USA (Dobrin and Wolf, 2016). Sadly, recent changes have seen the auxiliary model in Massachusetts almost entirely administratively swept away. What was a large, and in many ways thriving, and highly impactful, volunteer auxiliary policing model in Massachusetts, has all but gone. Changes in ‘POST’,The Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission1 certification standards at state level across Massachusetts, had the effect of wiping out all but a tiny number of auxiliary units. This rapid extinction event removed volunteer auxiliary police almost overnight from their communities across Massachusetts, communities that many of those individual auxiliaries had served in with dedication for decades. This represents the largest single volunteer police extinction event in the USA for decades. It serves as a worrying harbinger for volunteer policing more widely, especially in other states across the USA but also worldwide. Heralding the very real and urgent strategic threat to continuity of volunteer police programmes. Something that is resonant in the UK, as we see for the twelfth successive year an annual reduction in the number of volunteer special constables.2 Across the USA and internationally, some volunteer police models are thriving, with volunteer police impacting in a wide range of ways (Wolf and Borland Jones, 2018). Some are growing or innovating – the Netherlands, Estonia and Hungary are strong national examples, with significant scale, and interesting innovation of roles. However, many more programmes are struggling to survive (Britton, 2024). Many volunteer police programmes around the world are struggling to maintain sustainable numbers, with the combined headwinds of generational changes in reduced patterns of voluntarism, unfavourable attitudes towards police volunteers, volunteer police models with too narrow appeal and accessibility, and increasingly hostile public perceptions of policing particularly in respect of conduct, race, and misogyny. Despite strong evidence of return on investment (Britton et al., 2023) many forces are also struggling to effectively adapt and redefine the role, capability, professional identities and operating models for the volunteer police officer in a fast-changing, and ever more complex, litigious, dangerous and contested policing environment (Britton and Callender, 2018). Retention of longer-service volunteers is proving in many contexts to be a particular challenge (Britton, 2023).

London: The Police Foundation, 2025. 7p.

By Gabrielle T. Isaza, Ryan T. Motz, Hannah D. McManus, Nicholas Corsaro, and Amanda M. Shoulberg

The report “Examining Police Reforms in New Jersey: Impacts on Officer Attitudes and Self-Reported Behavior” is the first of a series of publications presenting the findings from the statewide evaluation of police use of force reform in New Jersey.

It describes the research team’s examination of the impact of the mandated training—including the Police Executive Research Forum’s Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) de-escalation training and Georgetown University’s Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE) peer intervention training—on officers’ perceptions, attitudes, and self-

reported behaviors.

The findings represent offics’ responses to training surveys immediately before, after, and one to two years following their training participation. The high response rates to the surveys—ranging from 12,623 to 17,036 responses at pre- and post-training—offer insights representative of law enforcement officers across New Jersey.

Arlington, VA: National Policing Institute, 2025. 217p.

By Andy Higgins

The Police Foundation’s Blueprints project explores the design choices made by English and Welsh police forces in the delivery of local policing – specifically in relation to the operating models they adopt to provide incident response, neighbourhood policing, local investigation and public protection. It takes as its starting point the considerable diversification and frequent change in local policing models that has occurred within and between police forces over the last one to two decades.

Project aims

Describe and (as far as possible) codify, the variety of local police operating models being practised across England and Wales, explain why they have developed and explore the rationales behind them.

Investigate what (if anything) can be concluded about the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, based on quantitative performance

analysis (where possible) and local experiences and learning.

Look, in-depth, at the way policing models enable and constrain police practitioners working in four functional areas: incident response, neighbourhood policing, local investigation and public protection.

Explore what can be learned from the way local policing is organised in other countries.

Assess the suitability of different design options against future policing challenges, drawing on the analysis presented in the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales, and focusing on strategic enablers such as preventative partnership and public cooperation.

The Police Foundation, 2024. 21p.

By Emma,Sutherland Disley, Alex,Sussex, Jon,Pollard, Jack,Saunders, Catherine L.,Morley, Katherine I.,Gkousis, Evangelos,Hulme, Shann

This report presents an outcome evaluation of the National Model for Liaison and Diversion (L&D) in England, which aims to identify and support vulnerable individuals within the criminal justice system (CJS) by linking them with appropriate health and social care services. The evaluation utilizes a novel, large-scale linked dataset, combining healthcare and criminal justice records, to assess the impact of the National Model on health service utilization, re-offending rates, diversion from the CJS, and the timeliness of court processes. Findings suggest L&D services engage individuals with multiple vulnerabilities, intervene at crisis points, and may increase diversion from custodial sentences. However, the evaluation found no overall reduction in re-offending following L&D referral.

Santa Monica, CA: Cambridge, UK: RAND, 2021. 232p.

By Kelly Lyn Mitchell, Julia Laskorunsky, Ebony Ruhland, and Tammy Dean

Community supervision, commonly known as probation or parole, involves people serving part of their sentence under supervision while living in the community. Supervision conditions are requirements that individuals must comply with during this period, such as engaging in a treatment program, maintaining employment, or regularly checking in with their probation or parole officer. However, the current condition-setting approach often focuses on setting restrictions on behavior without providing meaningful guidance for behavioral change. This policy brief proposes aligning supervision conditions with the Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) framework to improve outcomes for individuals on supervision and the community. 

Policy Brief, Minneapolis, MN: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. 2023. 7p.

By Will Engelhardt and Daniel S. Lawrence

Before the Juvenile Justice Reinvestment Act was implemented in December 2019, North Carolina was the last state that still automatically charged 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in its criminal legal system. In March 2014, led by then–chief district court judge Marcia Morey, a group of stakeholders from Durham County, North Carolina, started the Misdemeanor Diversion Program (MDP) to prevent 16- and 17-year-olds from entering the criminal legal system. The first of its kind in North Carolina, the program provides services including life skills courses, restorative justice efforts, and behavioral health treatment over a 90-day period and has expanded to include adults of all ages. It has also been replicated in certain counties throughout the state. The MDP enables law enforcement officers in Durham County to redirect people accused of committing their first misdemeanor crime(s) to community-based services in lieu of charge, citation or arrest. The purpose is to diminish unnecessary arrests and jail time and the collateral consequences of being charged with and convicted of a crime. A central feature of this program is that it occurs prearrest and precharge, meaning someone law enforcement officers believe may have committed a crime will not be arrested or charged and will not formally enter the justice criminal legal system in any way. In 2020 and 2021, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge Research Consortium, the Urban Institute conducted in-depth process and impact evaluations of the MDP, the findings of which we summarize in this report. By conducting both types of evaluations, the research team was able to better understand the processes and context that led to observed impacts. In addition, this is the first time a third-party research organization has evaluated the program’s impact, and such an evaluation is critical to demonstrating the program’s usefulness. Key takeaways from the process evaluation (A Process Evaluation of the Misdemeanor Diversion Program in Durham County, North Carolina) and the impact evaluation (An Impact Evaluation of the Misdemeanor Diversion Program in Durham County, North Carolina) are detailed in box 1.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 24p.

By Daniel S. Lawrence, Will Engelhardt, Storm Ervin, Rudy Perez

Before the implementation of the Juvenile Justice Reinvestment Act in December 2019, North Carolina was the last state that still automatically charged 16-to-17-year-olds as adults in its justice system. In March 2014, a group of stakeholders from Durham County—led by then–chief district court judge Marcia Morey—started the Misdemeanor Diversion Program (MDP) to prevent 16-to-17-year-olds from entering the justice system. The program has since expanded to include adults up to 26 years old. The first program of its kind in North Carolina, the MDP gives law enforcement officers in Durham County the discretion to redirect people accused of committing their first misdemeanor offense(s) to community-based services (such as life skills courses, restorative justice efforts, and behavioral health treatment) in lieu of citation or arrest. The purpose was to diminish unnecessary arrests and time in jail and the collateral consequences of being charged with and potentially convicted of a crime. What is particularly unique about this program is that it occurs prearrest and precharge, meaning someone law enforcement officers believe may have committed a crime will not be arrested or charged and will not formally enter the justice system in any way. This impact evaluation, the first conducted for the MDP, found that from March 2014 to February 2020, law enforcement officers in Durham County referred fewer than one-quarter of all people eligible for diversion to the MDP, though when they did, the program had positive impacts. In 2020 and 2021, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge Research Consortium, the Urban Institute conducted an in-depth impact evaluation of the MDP, the findings of which are detailed in this report. This impact evaluation was one component of Urban’s research on the MDP; Urban also conducted a detailed process evaluation that was described in a July 2021 report, A Process Evaluation of the Misdemeanor Diversion Program in Durham County, North Carolina (Engelhardt et al. 2021). Key Takeaways The data examined in this report cover January 2012 to February 2020 and were collected from North Carolina’s Administrative Office of the Courts, the MDP, the Durham Police Department (DPD), and the Durham County Sheriff’s Office. Box 1 provides five key findings the research team derived from these data. In this report, we assess the following: ◼ MDP enrollment ◼ MDP completion rates ◼ the MDP’s impact on new arrests, convictions, and jail admissions for program participants ◼ the MDP’s impact on disparities by race and ethnicity, sex, and age ◼ the MDP’s impact on system-level arrests, convictions, and jail admissions Analyses were separated into two population groups—people ages 16 to 17 and people ages 18 to 21—because each group was eligible for the MDP during different periods. These groups were statistically matched to comparison groups through propensity score matching for the analyses that examined new arrests, convictions, and jail admissions. The comparison groups were well balanced with the MDP participant groups (see appendix D) and were pulled from pools of people who were concurrently eligible for the program but did not participate. Five Key Findings ◼ Approximately 77 percent of people eligible for the MDP were not referred to the program while it was operational from March 2014 to February 2020. ◼ Of those who did participate in the program, there was a very high completion rate of 95 percent. ◼ MDP participants had significantly lower rates of rearrests, convictions, or jail admissions than comparison groups within six months, one year, and two years. ◼ Participation in the MDP significantly reduced disparities in new arrests within two years and in new convictions and jail admissions within six months between 16-to-17-year-old Black people and non-Black people, making the differences in the levels of new arrests between these groups much more equivalent than between Black and non-Black people who did not participate in the MDP. ◼ The MDP did not have a larger impact on countywide rates of arrests, convictions, or jail admissions for either of the two age groups we analyzed

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 83p.

By Brittany C. Cunningham, Vincent Bauer, Kira Cincotta, Jessica Dockstader, Benjamin Carleton, Bridgette Bryson, Daniel S. Lawrence

Officer safety is of critical importance in an era of increased risk for law enforcement officers (hereinafter “officers”). Officers respond to some of the most unpredictable, traumatic, and violent encounters of any profession. Although much of an officer’s workday entails repetitive interactions, some calls for service or self-initiated contacts by officers may escalate into dangerous encounters. For officers to adequately mitigate the risks they may encounter while responding to calls for service, they must be well informed regarding the types of risks they face, the situations that may pose greater risk, and the strategies that will mitigate these risks.

Although previous empirical work on officer safety has yielded many important insights, to our knowledge, no prior work has applied machine learning models to produce risk assessments to promote officer safety. This project explored the potential for machine learning to identify high-risk incidents to officers using only the information available to dispatchers. A risk assessment model that could successfully flag high-risk incidents at dispatch would be immensely useful to law enforcement agencies, making it possible for officers to be better informed about potential risk factors before arriving on scene. Such a model would also be useful to agencies as they decide how to allocate scarce resources, such as deciding which calls should receive single- or dual-officer vehicles, where to send alternative response teams, and whether to deploy specialized units.

Readers should be aware that the model reflects the data upon which it is built. Biases in reporting and collecting officer injuries, as well as in how officers respond to calls for service, will be mirrored in the model’s risk assessments. While we have gone to great lengths to build the model using objective factors, these biases could sometimes lead the model to identify a situation as high risk when in fact that situation reflects low risk to officers. Concerns about the potential for bias in machine learning are important to evaluate, and these techniques offer opportunities for objective empirical examination of divisive topics to minimize the bias that is already present in the real world.

Calls for service and Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data were merged from each of the four agencies, revealing the following findings:

Overall, the machine learning model performed well, correctly identifying officer injuries about half of the time. Given the rarity of officer injuries within the four agencies, being able to identify half of such rare situations is notable.

The model was also able to identify the factors that were the most important in predicting risk to officer safety and the types of incidents that posed the highest risk to officer safety. The results demonstrate that such a model can identify officer injuries from data on call characteristics; thus, whether such a model could be built into the dispatch process should be explored so that officers would be informed about potential risk factors before arriving at the location of a call.

The model highlighted factors and calls for service types that posed greater risks to officer safety.

The results of the machine learning model, along with the results from the officer interviews and surveys, also highlighted an often-overlooked aspect of police operations that is critically important to officer safety: dispatch.

Beyond producing statistical models, this project also collaborated with participating agencies to explore officer perspectives on safety and identify promising practices and recommendations to reduce risks to officers.

This project provides several practical benefits for improving officer safety. These benefits include the following:

Quantifying concepts that until now have been only informally or qualitatively understood (e.g., the relative risks of different calls for service types).

Comparing officer perceptions about injury risk to the quantitative data and identifying where gaps in understanding exist.

Highlighting the important relationship between dispatch and patrol, as well as the implications that this relationship has for officer safety.

Helping agencies assess the efficacy of their trainings and policies that directly affect officer safety.

Providing guidance on the information agencies collect and make available to dispatchers.

Supporting agencies to improve the amount and quality of risk and injury data agencies collect and use.

We hope that by providing agencies with a foundational knowledge of risks to officer safety, agencies will have a basis for modifying policy, training, and operations, leading to the implementation of strategies, processes, and procedures to keep officers and the communities they serve safe.

Arlington, VA: CNA Corporation, 2024. 52p.

By Daniel S. Lawrence, Bryce E. Peterson, Rochisha Shukla, and Lilly Robin

This publication represents a technical summary report of the Urban Institute’s evaluation of efforts with the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) to improve its public surveillance network. The goal of this study was to conduct a rigorous process, impact, and cost effectiveness evaluation of the process MPD took to optimize its network, which included improving operations, installing new cameras, and integrating video analytic technologies into its system. The two video analytic technologies were (1) automatic license plate recognition cameras and (2) high-definition cameras connected to gunshot detection technology. The evaluation used a mixed-methods research design. Qualitative data collection included in-depth observations of the department’s camera operations to understand their practices and determine which types of improvements would most benefit the program, as well as stakeholder interviews with staff members who either worked directly within the camera program or routinely used its footage in their work. We conducted interviews with camera operators, camera program supervisors, shift commanders, crash reconstruction unit officers, specialized investigations division officers, criminal investigations bureau detectives, and civilian managers from the department’s communication division. We also collected numerous quantitative data, including administrative crime data, metadata from the camera system, and systematic data on the costs associated with the system upgrades. We then used these data to assess: (1) the overall impact all of the interventions had on crime at the city, focus area, and intersection levels; (2) the specific impact of the two video analytic components on crime; and (3) the costs of the upgrades relative to their effectiveness. Our findings indicate that the impact of these interventions was mixed. We analyzed data in the two areas where MPD concentrated their surveillance optimization efforts and found some decreases in crime. However, when we focused on our analyses on the specific intersections where cameras and other technologies were installed, our models found increases in some criminal events, which is likely the result of the new cameras capturing crimes that may have otherwise been missed by the department. We also found no significant changes in crime in the areas where the two video analytic technologies were implemented compared to matched comparison areas. The findings from this research yielded several important lessons for improving criminal justice policy and practices. First, police departments must have strong, collaborative relationships with the vendors they select to upgrade their surveillance systems. Second, agencies that engage in efforts to optimize their surveillance systems should regularly re-evaluate their goals and processes to maximize the effectiveness of these new technologies. Finally, departments should ensure that all necessary personnel are made aware of the new technologies and have adequate access to them.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2024. 18p.

By Will Engelhardt. Storm Ervin, Daniel S. Lawrence, and Rudy Perez

Before its Raise the Age legislation in December 2019, North Carolina was one of the few states that still automatically charged 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in its justice system. In 2013, led by then–chief district court judge Marcia Morey, a group of stakeholders from Durham County, North Carolina, started the Misdemeanor Diversion Program (MDP) to prevent 16- and 17-year-olds from entering the justice system. The first of its kind in North Carolina, the program began in March 2014 and expanded over time to include people of all ages. It has also been replicated in certain counties throughout the state. The MDP allows law enforcement officers in Durham County to redirect people accused of committing their first misdemeanor crime(s) to community-based services in lieu of citation or arrest. The purpose is to diminish unnecessary arrests and time in jail, and the collateral consequences associated with being charged with and potentially convicted of a crime. What is particularly unique about this program is that it occurs prearrest and precharge, meaning someone law enforcement officers may believe has committed a crime is not arrested or charged and does not formally enter the justice system in any way. In 2020 and 2021, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge Research Consortium, the Urban Institute conducted an in-depth process evaluation of the MDP, the findings of which are detailed in this report. This process evaluation was one component of Urban’s research on the MDP; the research team is also conducting an outcome evaluation that will be described in a fall 2021 report.

Safely and Justice Challenge, 2021. 44p.

By: Michelle Kirby

A 2010 law established a pilot program to allow Connecticut courts to order GPS devices (ankle bracelets) to be used to track family violence offenders. Under this law, the Judicial Branch’s Court Support Services Division (CSSD) implemented the Alert Notification/GPS program in the Bridgeport, Danielson, and Hartford judicial districts. CSSD’s preliminary report on the program indicated that it met its objective to (1) enhance monitoring of high-risk family violence offenders and (2) increase victim safety. The December 2011 final summary report concluded that the program was successfully implemented in all three court locations with a high degree of collaboration systemwide.

Hartford: Connecticut General Assembly Office of Legislative Research, 2023. 4p.

By  Griffin Sims Edwards and Stephen Rushin

This Article examines the effect of state laws restricting the use of police quotas. Police quotas describe the establishment of a predetermined number of traffic stops, citations, or arrests that officers must make within a particular time period. Some police supervisors have historically used quotas to ensure adequate productivity by officers. However, critics argue that quotas incentivize officers to engage in unnecessary, and in some cases, unconstitutional, coercive behavior. Numerous states across the country have enacted laws banning or limiting the use of police quotas.

This Article analyzes a dataset of traffic and pedestrian stops from eleven law enforcement agencies with varied laws on police quotas over time. It finds minimal evidence that laws limiting police quotas reduce coercive behavior by police. If anything, agencies may engage in slightly more coercive behavior after the introduction of these laws. However, we find evidence that restrictions on the use of police quotas may improve the quality of traffic stops and vehicle searches.

We offer several hypotheses to explain these results. First, the narrow focus of quota laws may limit their effectiveness. Second, the managerial tactics that replace police quotas may incentivize officers to engage in similar amounts of coercive behavior. And third, the relatively weak enforcement mechanisms in state quota bans may reduce their deterrent effect.

We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the literature on police regulation. We also offer recommendations for reforming police quota laws.

109 Iowa Law Review 2127 (2024), 

By Zoë Robinson and Stephen Rushin

The law enforcement lobby represents one of the most important and undertheorized barriers to criminal justice reform. We define the law enforcement lobby as the constellation of entrenched actors within the justice system—particularly police unions, correctional officer unions, and prosecutor associations—that exert an outsized role in policy development. The law enforcement lobby operates largely without coordinated opposition, resulting in capture of criminal justice policymaking and skewed policy outcomes that often institutionalize injustice and subordination. The strength of the law enforcement lobby also presents a challenge to the growing defunding and abolition movements. Nevertheless, the law enforcement lobby remains at the periphery of contemporary scholarly conversations about the democratization and design of criminal justice institutions.

This Article describes and evaluates the influence of the law enforcement lobby on criminal justice policy. It argues that the law enforcement lobby raises unique problems that extend beyond traditional lobbying concerns, including the ability to influence life and liberty, the power to perpetuate racial subordination, and a pervasive power over the operation of democratic institutions.

Drawing on the growing calls for democratization and power-shifting in the criminal justice system, this Article offers a range of recommendations to curtail the strength of the law enforcement lobby. First, the Article argues for reforms that “level up” of the power of competing interests that can counter the power of the law enforcement lobby in criminal justice policymaking. In doing so, the Article focuses specifically on reforms that imbed contestation in policymaking by communities most impacted by the criminal justice system. Second, the Article concurrently proposes mechanisms to “level down” the power of the law enforcement lobby, including realistic restrictions on the lobbying capacity of law enforcement interest groups that draws on First Amendment Speech Clause doctrine that permits restriction of public employee speech. Taken together, these reforms could facilitate broader transformation of the American criminal justice system.

107 Minnesota Law Review 1965 (2023), 73p.

By Barry Friedman, Rachel Harmon & Farhang Heydari

For far too long, the federal government has failed to exercise its constitutional authority to mitigate the harms imposed by local policing. Absent federal intervention, though, some harmful aspects of policing will not be addressed effectively, or at all. States and localities often lack the necessary capacity and expertise to change policing, and many states and localities lack the will. This Article argues for federal intervention and describes what that intervention should look like. The Article begins by describing three paradigmatic areas of local policing that require federal intervention to create real change: excessive use of force, racial discrimination, and the unregulated use of surveillance technologies. Because state and local governments are either unable or unwilling to address these problems alone, the federal government should intervene to identify and enforce minimum standards, develop best practices, collect data, and distribute resources nationwide. Regrettably, Congress has failed to act adequately to improve local policing for the better, although it has tried to encourage reform through the use of its Spending Power. This Article argues that Congress should utilize its regulatory powers under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Commerce Clause to address these paradigmatic problem areas, and it explains how this can be done consistently with Supreme Court doctrine. Alongside—or in the absence of—congressional action, the executive branch has the power and responsibility to act to address policing’s harms. The Article explains that, though indirect, the President wields considerable power to influence policing by setting policy, implementing federal programs, enforcing civil rights, and supervising federal law enforcement. Although the executive branch should use this power to promote local policing that is effective, fair, and accountable, and that minimizes harm, administration after administration has failed to do so consistently and also has failed to hold federal law enforcement to these standards. Recent executive branch efforts have improved the situation, but there still exists a gaping chasm between how the federal government should be influencing local policing and how it is doing so today

109 Virginia Law Review 1527 (December, 2023), 101p.

By Anne McNamara

During the height of the Civil Rights movement, the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio crafted the policing power to stop and search an individual without a warrant, without probable cause, and if the officer possesses a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Thirty years later, in Whren v. United States, the Court willfully blinded itself to the subjective motivations of an officer who initiate a Terry stop, requiring only a claim of some lawful reason to initiate a stop to adhere to the Fourth Amendments protections. Despite overwhelming evidence that the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence disparately affects Black people, the Court continuously asserts that the Equal Protection Clause (EPC)—not the Fourth Amendment—is the proper constitutional avenue for relief from race-motivated policing. Even a defendant who successfully overcomes the EPC’s practically insurmountable requirement of proving discriminatory intent is not afforded the exclusionary rule’s protection. Ultimately, the Court’s use of EPC as its suggested remedy provides little concrete relief for individuals subjected to pretextual stops. Against this backdrop of racially influenced law enforcement, the advent and development of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) has fundamentally altered American policing over the past decade. FRT is an algorithmic code, created by private companies, capable of recognizing a person’s facial identity by comparing it to other faces that are located in a centralized database. Some critics of the police’s use of FRT warn of its disparate impact on people of color who already face higher instances of police surveillance. Further, critics caution that FRT algorithms have higher error rates in identifying people of color, that databases used are often overly saturated with people of color, and that the police’s unregulated, unrestrained use of FRT reinforces preconceived notions of “Black criminality.” Historically, federal courts have been reluctant to condemn police implementation of technological advances as violative of the Fourth Amendment. While the police are prohibited from using publicly unavailable technology to surveil the details of an individual’s home, technology deployed by law enforcement in a public space often escapes constitutional constraints. In some instances, however, defendants successfully challenge police use of advanced technology for surveillance purposes through the lens of mosaic theory, which assesses police behavior in the aggregate to determine whether prolonged periods of surveillance constitutes an invasion of privacy impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. In light of the Court’s silence regarding FRT, a handful of cities and states have enacted laws that curb or completely ban police use of FRT. On the federal level, the preceding Congress proposed two bills: one seeking to require probable cause for police to deploy the technology, the other seeking to implement a complete federal ban of FRT and to disincentivize state and local use by withholding certain funding. This Note first surveys the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that created a legal justice system that is willfully ignorant of an officer’s potential racial motivations.18 Then, this Note discusses the police’s implementation of FRT and how it further infringes upon Black people’s liberties and dignities under the guise of “neutral” technology. Next, this Note explores the Court’s reasoning in evolving technology and surveillances cases—with a particular emphasis on mosaic theory—and discusses state and proposed federal statutory approaches to FRT regulation. Then, this Note argues that the most dangerous uses of FRT are the least likely to be recognized and curbed by the Supreme Court due to its longstanding refusal to allow the constitution to check unrestrained police behavior, leaving Black people defenseless against FRT’s role in increasing the structural inequalities embedded in our legal system. This Note concludes by calling for a comprehensive federal ban on police use of FRT that adequately incentivizes state and local law enforcement to enact similar bans.

SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. LVI:731 , 26p.

B/y Griffin Edwards and

Stephen Rushin

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court held in New York v. Belton that police officers could lawfully search virtually anywhere in a vehicle without a warrant after the arrest of any occupant in the vehicle. Then, in 2009, the Court reversed course in Arizona v. Gant, holding that police could only engage in vehicle searches after such arrests in a smaller number of extenuating circumstances. This series of cases became a flash point for the broader debate about the regulation of policing. Law enforcement groups argued that administratively complex rules, like those established in Gant, risk officer safety. But some scholars and civil rights activists worried that by giving police officers wider discretion to search vehicles incident to arrest, the Belton rule may have led to unjustified civil rights violations and racial profiling.

This Article argues that, by limiting vehicle searches incident to arrest, Gant may have disincentivized policing tactics that disproportionately target individuals of color without jeopardizing officer safety.

By utilizing a data set of traffic stops from thirteen law enforcement agencies in seven states, this Article presents an empirical study of the effects of shifting doctrines related to vehicle searches incident to arrest. This Article makes two findings. First, it finds no evidence that Gant endangered officer safety. Changes in state doctrines related to vehicle searches incident to arrest are not associated with increases in assaults of officers during traffic stops. Second, it hypothesizes that Gant may have reduced racial profiling. Gant may be linked to a somewhat larger decline in vehicle searches incident to arrest for nonwhite individuals relative to white individuals.

These findings are a reminder that seemingly neutral procedural choices by courts in regulating police behavior may have racially disparate effects. We conclude by arguing for the narrowing of the discretionary authority of police officers as a mechanism for reducing disparities in the criminal justice system.

91 Fordham L. Rev. 1 (2022).